President's Message
I wanted to personally welcome you to the new year of the Greater Raleigh Area Chapter (GRAC) of AACN. I have the privilege of serving as the President of the chapter for the current 2015-2016 year.
AACN President—Karen McQuillan’s theme for this year is “Courageous Care”. Courageous Care is something that Critical Care and Progressive Care nurses do daily. Caring for patients takes courage. Speaking with a family member about impending death of a loved one takes courage. Doing whatever it takes to provide exceptional care knowing that despite your best efforts, your patient might not survive takes courage. Being aware of something you don’t understand and then learning about it to provide better care for your patients takes courage. So this is something nursing should be proud of!!!
We have some exciting things planned for the GRAC this year. We have established 3 major goals for FY 2016:
1. Increase GRAC nursing student membership (Get area nursing students involved in AACN & GRAC)
2. Increased community visibility & engagement of GRAC (Food drive, Guardian Ad Litem program for Christmas & More involvement with the Step on Sepsis Race)
3. Increase the number of certified chapter members by 10%.
We have some great meetings planned for this upcoming year. Based on the feedback that we received from the needs assessment chapter members did last year—we are trying to plan topics/meetings based on the responses. The next two months have already been confirmed. We do request that all that wish to attend RSVP. This is very important to have an accurate number for preparations and costs. If you RSVP—please attend the meeting. No shows do cost the sponsors and may impact their willingness to sponsor future programs.
We normally only have 1-2 chapter sponsored meetings per year (meetings not covered by pharmaceutical or medical device sales reps). To help offset some of the costs for the chapter sponsored meetings, we are asking for a $5 donation at the door (cash or check) to help cover the expenses. We try our best to have monthly meetings sponsored but some months we are unable to.
· October 20, 2015---Heart Failure—Sponsored by Novartis---Reyes Restaurant in Cary
· November 19, 2015---“Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” Palliative Care Update---Sponsored by GRAC Chapter----WakeMed Andrews Conference Center Raleigh Campus
The chapter is proud of our community involvement and we want to continue that. Please bring donations for the annual canned food drive to the October meeting. Let’s try to beat the 200 items that we contributed last year!! Information about the Guardian Ad Litem program (for children in foster care) that we will be doing over the Christmas holiday will be shared at the upcoming meeting. We did this last year and feedback from members was great so we plan on doing again this year.
Finally please visit the links below for any information about AACN and GRAC. I’ve included the links for both. Please make sure that your national and local memberships are active. National membership is only $78 and local is only $20. You may renew your national membership on line and for local membership –we encourage you to use the PayPal account the chapter has on our site.
http://www.aacn.org/
http://www.greaterraleighchapter.com/
Thanks for your involvement in AACN and GRAC and we look forward to a great year. Please reach out to me or any board member if you have any questions or concerns.
Tracey
Tracey Weeks BSN, RN
Alumnus-CCRN